Many organizations need to track the business opportunities of their sales forces. By tracking various business opportunities, an organization can forecast business statistics such as revenue and product quantities based on those opportunities. In addition, organizations generally would like to monitor how their actual revenue relates to their forecasted revenue based on actual-to-forecasted business statistics. By monitoring actual revenue, an organization can determine whether it is on track to meet its forecasted revenue. If it is not on track, then the organization can take appropriate actions.
Traditionally, each salesperson in an organization would track their own opportunities and, when requested, would provide their forecasts to their sales manager. Upon receiving these forecasts, a sales manager might create a spreadsheet that totals the forecasts of all the sales people reporting to that sales manager. That sales manager would then provide a summary of the forecast to a regional or divisional sales manager. Unfortunately, because only summary forecast information is provided to the next management level within a sales force, a certain manager may not have access to the historical details used to generate such forecasts. As a result, a manager may not be able to easily identify revenue or forecasting problems.
Some enterprise-based solutions have been developed that allow organizations to track their forecasts and the supporting details. These enterprise-based solutions assume a highly experienced administrator will set up and manage the forecasts for each organization. For example, some enterprise-based solutions allow an administrator to define the SQL queries that specify how forecasts are to be generated. However, it takes a high degree of sophistication to correctly define SQL queries. In addition, these enterprise-based solutions typically display forecast information on a record-by-record basis that may not provide an effective overview of the forecast information. Also, these enterprise-based solutions require that an administrator manually initiate each forecast, which can present problems if the administrator is unavailable or forgets to initiate a forecast at the appropriate time.
It would be desirable to have a forecast system that can be used by less experienced users and would provide forecast information in a way that can be used more effectively by less experienced users.